Hollywood's winter weather man

Dieter Sturm lets it snow all over Hollywood's biggest movies

December 30, 2010|By Christopher Borrelli | Tribune reporter

Snowmaker Dieter Sturm poses for a portrait at Harris Ice Company.

Dieter Sturm can do fog. Wind is no issue. Dieter Sturm can summon fire, rain. He can replicate most weather, regardless of season. But snow is his specialty, and though there are other special effects guys around the country who do snow for movies, it's Dieter Sturm who excels at manufacturing realistic snow. He even has an Academy Award for contributions to movie snow. In fact, Sturm, who is 55 and has lived in Lake Geneva, Wis., for 30 years, prefers snow as a verb. As in, "I have snowed most of Chicago."

Though that's modest.

Sturm, who owns Sturm's Special Effects International with his wife, Yvonne, has snowed most of the Midwest and a good chunk of the East Coast. Hw snowed George Clooney for "Up in the Air," and Johnny Depp for "Public Enemies." "I've snowed the Michigan Street bridge. I've snowed the park near Water Tower for 'Wicker Park.' I've snowed State Street and the Art Institute, and I just snowed in front of the Music Box."

That was for the upcoming Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum film, "The Vow." He also just finished snowing the North Shore and western suburbs, so much it resembled the chilly shell of a mid-winter Minnesota, for the Steven Soderbergh film "Contagion."

And before snow?

He was a public relations director for the (now defunct) Playboy Resort in Lake Geneva; then he was the spokesperson for TSR, Inc., the Lake Geneva-based company (also defunct) that published Dungeons & Dragons. And then in the early '80s, being a lifelong tinkerer and amateur inventor, he eased into special effects, creating his first effects at a groundbreaking ceremony for a supermarket in his hometown, Milwaukee. Instead of a ribbon-cutting or typical shovel-toss-and-smile, he rigged the dirt to explode upward.

These days, the constant fine tuning of artificial snow, is a bit softer, quieter. That said, he did just snow Detroit for "A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas," opening next year.

Q How does one become the go-to snow guy for movie snow in the Midwest?

A Well, there was this guy named Kurt Smith in Chicago. He was the snow guy and I was brand new to the business and would do any work they had for me. I was asked to work on commercials that had snow and I learned things from Kurt and when he decided to retire I started to get the label of the go-to guy for making snow. I had a lot of ideas for developing equipment that would be more efficient and create better-looking snow, more cost-effective snow, more portable snow. I built the Sturm Snowmaker truck, which chips and shaves blocks and blows out real snow at 800 pounds per minute.

Q: Which is equivalent to what in actual snowfall?

A: An area of about three feet by three feet and a foot deep. On "Contagion," around Chicago, we went through 700,000 pounds of block ice. Our record still goes back to "The Horse Whisperer," which we did in upstate New York and went through 56 semi-tractor trailers full of block ice in three weeks.

Q: What did you win your Scientific and Technical Achievement Oscar for in 1995?

A: For developing a biodegradable snowflake. Snow was plastic and Styrofoam and though you could clean it up, you never could entirely. Mine was corn and cheese whey. I bleached it white, organically. Took me two years to develop. It broke the industry open. Now there are different kinds of flakes.

Q: So you get royalties when it snows in movies?

A: No, there are a lot of different variations now, but I did get an Oscar, given to me by Jamie Lee Curtis, which was nice.

Q: The first movie you did as chief snow guy was "Planes, Trains & Automobiles"?

A: I didn't head up the special effects but I brought in my equipment and it was the first effects job I had where I left my career in PR to make snow full-time. We made real snow for the scenes when John Candy and Steve Martin crash their car and Steve Martin slides on the snowy slope. We made snow on the L -tracks in Chicago. Even the ending, at the house, which we shot in Wilmette, we made snow there. On John Hughes' turf, of course.

Q: You're most famous for "Fargo"?

A: I think so. Half the snow in that movie was ours. And manmade! In fact, snow is a character in "Fargo." We snowed in the entire roof of a parking garage at the Minneapolis airport, five acres. It was 10 degrees below. We had to pump water from the ground level up to us to keep the machines going.

Q: Do you have another favorite snow scene?

A: Probably the snow we did for "True Lies," which we shot at the Breakers mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, which doubled as Switzerland. There were several weeks of snowmaking involved and probably 20 semis filled with blocks of ice to do that.

Q: Are you largely redundant in winter?

A: Well, no, but often we're doing snow management. We may remove snow or even clean the snow because snow gets dirty. We clean it by dressing old snow with new. Also, streets may be plowed already so we have to go in and cover them up again. Sometimes it only looks like you have snow.